Today, many microprocessors and digital signal processor (DSP) chips exist, such as the Intel Pentium family, the ARM microprocessors used in many portable consumer electronics devices, and Texas Instruments DSP chips such as the TI64xx family, which have multiple arithmetic functional units for performing calculations. Typically, these chips have integer arithmetic units for performing integer calculations, and floating point units (FPUs) for performing floating point format operations. Floating point is a way to represent numbers using an exponent and a mantissa and a sign bit, which offers wide dynamic range.
Floating point operation performance is limited both because traditional micro-architectures fail to support a sufficiently wide variety of operation types, and because vector operations are necessarily slowed down by required data permutations before or after the floating point operations.